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Extremely normal.

Came home from work, started typing an Email, fell asleep and woke up just before midnight. So, a few more hours of ‘z’ and I’ll be as chipper as seventies’ wallpaper. Why did we fall for the trick of selling us rolls of paper with lumps of wood still in it, and why did we believe it was fashionable to stick lumpy paper to our carefully-smoothed plaster walls and then paint it, rather than just leave the plaster lumpy then paint the walls?

But that’s a different post.

This one is about weather. All over the news is the shock-horror revelation that it might get cold in the UK in January. Trains will stop, the roads will collapse and the cheeeldren will be sucked into an alternate dimension and return as lizard people intent on killing us all (or did that already happen?).

It’s the UK. Reporting weather forecasts is pointless. The weather will do exactly as it damn well pleases. We have days where there is snow in the morning, dry ground under a warm sun at midday and hail in the evening, and that’s in May. All four seasons can show up in one day here, no matter what season the rest of the world is experiencing. I have often seen, and I bet many people have too, one side of a street wet with falling rain and the other side dry and in sunshine. Or rain pouring down the front window of my house while the sun pours in at the back.

You cannot study climate change in the UK and expect to be taken seriously. Nobody can take records that fast.

I have some new carnation plants in my otherwise silent greenhouse. I’ve grown them before, they are pleasing little plants, good ground cover and almost maintenance-free. There was one big one, about ten years ago, that got so confused by the cold-mild-cold-mild winter that it was in flower on Christmas day. It committed suicide the following year in desperation. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had uprooted itself and stomped off to throw itself on the compost heap.

There was a news report I recall from the mid nineties where a reporter, all skirt-suit and earnestly blank eyes, reported the desperate plight of the snowbound railways. In the background was a station that looked as if someone had dusted it with talcum powder, and she wasn’t wearing a coat, hat or gloves. A few years earlier I had driven a Hammerite-painted Mk 2 Fiesta with no door seals to a place called Cruden Bay through snowdrifts that looked like hills and along roads occasionally entirely obscured by drifting snow. There were years where the winter trek to the pub meant taking a shovel and years where the same trek could have been done in a T-shirt.

Climate changes. In the UK. it changes by the hour. This is not the place to be a climate expert, it will drive you insane. As indeed it appears to have done in East Anglia and other places too. The BBC has been insane for a long time, as soon as they started reporting a light dusting of snow as the End of Everything their insanity became clear. We weren’t supposed to get any snow. Global Warming was supposed to put an end to this inconvenience and allow us to grow Kiwi fruit and oranges on our patios. Last year it was a struggle to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse. My father used to grow them outdoors, and yet we are told global warming must be true because the army of drones says so?

Nothing coming is ‘extreme’ for UK weather. Normal? Nothing is normal here. The whole place is a madhouse as successive invaders have found. You can invade all you want, we just do what we do and you’ll adjust to fit in eventually. Resistance is futile. Well who did you think they used as a model for the Borg?

So we are to experience a relatively mild January and that is to be touted as an extreme weather event. The drones will believe it because the drones have no minds. They think what they are told to think.

And we’re supposed to save them? Sod them. Let the world burn off its stubble and let it start again without the dross and the weeds.

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19 thoughts on “Extremely normal.”

Bitter; Let the world burn. But somewhat apt. Try to be just pessismistic and not quite cynical. You may feel more of an accomplishment for what you represent. Which is a tanglehold onto sanity in a more or less insane world. I am no budhist, but you reflect quite a bit of that in your prose. Which I an others enjoy….

I’m increasingly becoming convinced that it all has to fall apart completely before the drones even notice there’s anything wrong. That’s what the Marxists want to happen so they can then impose their own view of ‘society’ on everyone. That won’t work. Never has and never will.

But the drones have to see it before they’ll believe it, and before they’ll fight against it. As they always have – and always will.

Great post Leggy, don’t mind anyone telling you to be positive, bitterness is an underated flavour ! You’re dead right about the weather, anyone who gardens in this country should be mentioned in despatches for valour beyond the call. It doesn’t matter what you plant or when or where, the weather will watch you doing it with detached interest and mild amusement and then stamp all over it. I have just acquired am allotment after a couple of years on the waiting list, you’d think at my age I would know better but I keep coming back for more punishment.

I’m beginning to wish I’d put in a conservatory rather than a greenhouse. That would have been heated and also slug-proof. Plain tiled floor, a few grow-bags and pots… and more funny looks and rolled eyes from the neighbours.

What swung it initially was that you don’t need planning permission for a greenhouse. Also the greenhouse was a hell of a lot cheaper. It is, however, time to invest in a greenhouse heater.

In the stock room at work, the radio is always on. There was an advert for some feminine problem cream ‘She gets a burning sensation when she uses the bathroom’. It was followed by a news item in the fires in Oz and the image I got of ‘bush fires down under’ made me wish I didn’t have the sort of mind that randomly connects things.

Still, ladies, if you do get a bush fire down under, there’s a cream for it.

I’m waiting for the experts to sell us the idea that having ‘normal’ weather for the time of year is very unusual and a clear sign of global warming. And as the post makes clear, normal weather for the U.K. can be anything. So whatever the weather,in global warming speak, it’s not normal.

That’s the thing. UK weather has never been normal. The global warmers promised we could grow Kiwi fruit and grapes in Scotland by now. Tesco were even selling grapevines and olive trees last summer (I bet they didn’t sell many) when I struggled to get my tomatoes to turn red!

There are successful grapevines on the West coast of Scotland. In huge and expensively heated greenhouses at Culzean castle.

That might not be true, because a lot of people also believe in ‘lactose intolerance’ these days. I can name one that won’t eat anything with ‘lactose’ on the label… but he drinks milk. It doesn’t have lactose on the label so it’s okay, you see?

One of the more irritating side-effects of snow hysteria round here is the panic-buying of bread.

Despite thew fact that we are a few miles from a major motorway, and, in any case, there is a large bread factory in town, the merest whiff of snow in the forecast and the local populace rushes out to pile supermarket trolleys high with enough loaves to feed the 5,000.

And when the shelves are empty, they start on the ingredients; people who have never made bread in their lives elbow each other out of the way to get the last bags of flour and packets of yeast which they will never use – a bloody nuisance for those of us who do make bread (actually, pizza and breakfast rolls) on a weekly basis and actually need the stuff.

THAT explains it! The shop was furiously busy from Thursday onwards and I wondered why. It’s snow panic. The papers show a clear road with a light dusting of white either side and the drones think it means there’ll be six feet of snow by Monday.

I didn’t buy all the food they did, so they can sit at home and watch it rot. I bought a snow shovel.